All this traveling has given me plenty of time to appreciate the new road from Avanos to Kayseri. It’s a fine road -- wide, empty and straight as a die, and as a Brit I am especially appreciative as my own country gave up the ghost as regards anything infrastructural many years ago. While I lived in Bristol a much-needed tram never reached the drawing-board. Ditto the Crossrail link to join east and west London. The reasons were sometimes good (environmental) and sometimes bad (economics), but the end result was the same -- a depressing sense of paralysis.
Contrast this with Turkey where we can hardly move for glittering new transport infrastructure, be it İstanbul’s new funicular, Eskişehir’s space-age tram or the new bus stations sprouting like daisies countrywide. In Kayseri signs are already advertising a forthcoming attraction -- the new tram which we really can expect to be up and running in 2008.
The downside to the smart new Kayseri road is that it is very dull to drive along, having been carved straight through that part of the Anatolian plain that offered least resistance. The one bright spot is the Sarıhan, the sturdy Silk Road Yellow Caravanserai which stands right beside it.
I first saw the Sarıhan in 1996 when it was a crumbling relic awaiting the restorers’ heavy hand. Yasin had dropped me off there to walk back to Avanos with a friend.
“You can’t go wrong,” he said. “You walk toward the river and then turn left.”
Left, right, it made no difference. Within hours my friend and I were lost in apparently never-ending fields. Eventually we stumbled on a man out hoeing onions in his garden. He was doing this in his underpants, having had no expectation of yabancı visitors. But he was quick to recover his composure and handed both of us cucumbers to eat while he dragged on his trousers. Then he led us out to the road and rescue.
Four years later my friend Mehmet hired the restored Sarıhan as a romantic backdrop for his wedding. Unfortunately that was also the day that a sneaky scorpion in my bed chose to sting me.
Determined not to miss the big event, I showed up at the Sarıhan dosed to the eyeballs with pain-killers. It was a crisp, clear October evening, perfect for fireworks and festivities, and Mehmet’s bride was the princess stepped straight from the pages of a fairy tale. My landlord steered me to the respectability of a women’s table where we toasted the couple in coke and shivered in the autumnal chill. To warm up, I decided to join in the dancing. Then someone gently touched my arm and that’s the last I remember of the party as the scorpion’s sting overwhelmed me.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
